Lucy by the Sea (11)

—

Almost always, there was that sense of being underwater; of things not being real.





In the morning William said we needed more groceries and he would go to the store, did I want to come; he had gone a few times without me, and he had gone to the drugstore to get my pills. Each time he went to the grocery store he came home with stories of how depleted the shelves were: There was no toilet paper, or paper towels, or cleaning materials, or even chicken. This frightened me; I thought: We are in trouble! But William still carried on, and he had found two rolls of toilet paper in a small store on a back road.

That morning I said Yes, I wanted to go with him. And he said, “Okay, but you stay in the car. No reason to put us both at risk.” So we drove into town and parked in the parking lot of the grocery store, and William put on his mask and gloves and went inside. I did not mind staying in the car. And there were many people to watch! There was a faint reverberation in my heart as I watched them. Most of them were wearing handmade masks, and by that I mean the kind Bob Burgess wore, not the kind that William wore, which was paper and blue and looked surgical. But then I saw a mother speaking harshly to her son as they were loading their car, the kid must have been nine years old at the most, and that woman, I hated her; the son looked so unhappy; he had large dark eyes.

Everyone else was intriguing to me. Mostly women, but some men, and their lives were mysteries to me. They wore clothes I would not have worn; many women wore leggings—even in this cold!—going right to their waist, not being covered by any of the sweatshirts they had on. No one—that I could see—wore any makeup at all.



—

And then a woman started to yell. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but she seemed to be looking at me, and she came closer to our car; she was middle-aged and skinny and her hair was half white but sort of orangey and she looked at me with fury. She wore no mask. I couldn’t get the window down, because I would have had to start the car, and I was too mixed up by this woman who was yelling at me, and then I heard her say, “You goddamn New Yorkers! Get the hell out of our state!” She kept thrusting her arm out to the side. People were looking at her and she kept standing there yelling, and finally someone—a man—said, “Hey, leave her alone—”

And the woman went away, but I was so embarrassed because people were looking at me, and I looked down at my hands until William came out. He put the groceries in the back of the car; he did it as though he was irritated, and so it wasn’t until we drove away that I told him what had happened, and he shook his head and said nothing. I said, “William, I hated getting yelled at!”

He said, not nicely, “Nobody likes getting yelled at, Lucy.”

He said nothing else the whole ride home.



—

When we got back to the house William cut an orange into four pieces and ate them, and the sound he made, slurping them, made me go upstairs to the bedroom I was staying in. “They had toilet paper,” he called out to me.



—

Mom, I cried inside myself to the nice mother I had made up, Mom, I can’t do this! And the nice mother I had made up said, You are really doing so well, honey. But, Mom, I hate this! And she said, I know, honey. Just hang in there and it will end.

But it did not seem like it would end.





I should say this:

It was during this time that I noticed that I hated William each night after dinner. It was usually because I felt that he was not really listening to me. His eyes—when he glanced at me as I spoke—seemed to not really be looking at me, and it made me remember how much he could not listen. Or listen well. I would think: He is not David! And then I would think: He’s not Bob Burgess! Sometimes I would have to leave the house in the dark and walk down by the water, swearing out loud.





The day after we had gone to the grocery store it rained, and by afternoon I was so restless that I took a walk with an old umbrella I had found on the porch. When I came back I said to William, as I sat down on the couch, “You weren’t even nice to me after that woman yelled at me. Why couldn’t you have been nice?”

The rain was hitting against the windows, and outside the ocean splashed on the rocks and all seemed brown and gray. William got up and went and stood in the doorway of the living room, and when he didn’t say anything I looked up. “Lucy,” he said. He said it with difficulty. “Lucy, yours is the life I wanted to save.” He walked over toward me but he did not sit down. “My own life I care very little about these days, except I know the girls still depend on me, especially Bridget; she’s still just a kid. But, Lucy, if you should die from this, it would—” He shook his head with weariness. “I only wanted to save your life, and so what if some woman yelled at you.”

iv

One night after that rainy day I saw a sunset. It had been cloudy all day, and just before the sun went down the clouds had broken, and the clouds were suddenly a brilliant orange that spread up against the sky, I could not believe it, and the color got sent back over the water toward the house. You had to stand on our porch and look through the far window to see it, but the sky kept changing as the sun set farther, higher and higher the deep red went. I called to William and he came and we stood there for many minutes, and then we finally pulled up chairs to watch it. What a thing! And so we watched for these sunsets as time went by, and sometimes they arrived: the most golden orange glory in the world, it seemed to me at those times.